Home NOVEDADESLIBRO DE LA SEMANA A History Of Role-Play In Psychology Prisons And Performance

A History Of Role-Play In Psychology Prisons And Performance

‘Incarceration Games’

by Soraya Alcalá
A History Of Role-Play In Psychology Prisons And Performance

UNITED KINGDOM

Published on 30th April 2024, Incarceration Games highlights the ‘stage production era’ in American social psychology, during which volunteer participants were cast as unwitting players in manipulative role-playing games – where fact and fiction became uncomfortably blurred.

The most notorious of these studies include Stanley Milgram’s Yale obedience experiments (1961-62) and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), both of which the author examines in detail. Drawing on original interviews and extensive archival research, Scott-Bottoms uses his expertise as a theatre historian to reconstruct these staged events, and to shed fresh light on the motivations of the players involved.

Taking readers from first modern uses of role-play in the 1930s, when it was developed as a tool for therapeutic intervention with inmates of the New York prison system, Incarceration Games tracks the continuing use of such methods in a range of contexts. The book shows how, in the 21st century, the legacy of psychological role-play methods has resurfaced in everything from reality TV formats to the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ used by the US military on terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

Edifying, fascinating and very much an accessible read, this book demonstrates how psychology, prisons and improvised performance have been woven together, historically, in often troubling ways. It will leave readers wondering at the cultural impacts and manipulative misuses of role-playing over the last century.

Praise from fellow authors in pre-publication reviews: 

“The most thorough treatment to date of Philip Zimbardo’s so-called Stanford Prison Experiment and its cultural afterlives, Incarceration Games moves well beyond ‘gotcha’ sensibility to delve into the multiple and varied cultural mediations of the study and its kin, as they became iconic shorthands for understanding disciplinary institutions, social control, and dehumanization. The reading of social psychology through a performance studies lens is long overdue and well executed, providing a refreshing, novel perspective.”– Michael Pettit, author of The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America

 

 “Ambitious, timely and original, Incarceration Games develops new understandings about role-play and imprisonment in relation to ideas of audience, agency, control, and coercion. The author brings a diverse range of performance examples into dialogue in a way that is playful, rigorous, and illuminating.”– Caoimhe McAvinchey, author of Applied Theatre: Women and the Criminal Justice System

 

Synopsis:

Following an introductory Preface, Incarceration Games is structured in three parts, each with five chapters.

Part One, ‘The Stage Production Era’, explores the early development of improvised role-play as a therapeutic approach in prisons. It shows how the methods of psychotherapist J.L. Moreno were then adapted by social psychologists as tools for empirical research. Experiments by Solomon Asch, Muzafer Sherif, Leon Festinger and others are explored in detail, and the author demonstrates how such studies became increasingly manipulative and deceptive over time. Part One concludes with a re-examination of Stanley Milgram’s notorious obedience experiments at Yale, in which participants were led to believe they were complicit in torture. But did they really ‘suspend their disbelief’?

Part Two, ‘Approaching Stanford’, zooms in to examine the Stanford Prison Experiment in detail. Two chapters explore the underlying concerns that led psychologist Philip Zimbardo to design his most famous study—including his pioneering interest in false confessions by prisoners under interrogation. The story of the prison experiment itself is then told across three chapters, from the perspectives of—respectively—the psychologists, the prisoners, and the guards. The author argues that the psychologists’ understanding of what happened was shaped by their own prior assumptions, but that these events look rather different when viewed from the position of the improvising role-players.

Part Three, ‘Beyond the Lab’, explores the tangled legacy of psychology’s stage production era. In the 1970s, changes in ethics procedures made further experiments like Zimbardo’s and Milgram’s unthinkable. Yet their scandalous reputation only made them more famous, and the story of the Stanford experiment, in particular–distorted through sensationalised media coverage—has created misleading ideas about real-world prisons. The author also considers the further development of improvised ‘incarceration games’ in prisons, as a tool for rehabilitation; in contemporary art and reality TV, as forms of entertainment; and in military interrogations, as a form of psychological torture. In each instance, the lines between fiction and reality become weirdly blurred.

Published on 30th April by University of Michigan Press Incarceration Games: A History of Role-Play in Psychology, Prisons and Performance is available to pre-order in hardcover (ISBN No: 978-0472076710) priced £64.00, paperback (ISBN No: 978-0472056712) and Kindle format (£27.70) on Amazon at https://tinyurl.com/y2vw9396  / https://tinyurl.com/4kpex63h and https://tinyurl.com/4pe3c3vr

It is also available to purchase on Amazon.com at paperback pre-order price of $34.95

About the author:

Stephen Scott-Bottoms is a writer, theatre-maker and storyteller, who explores complex topics in an accessible and engaging way. He is Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the University of Manchester, UK, and taught previously at the Universities of Leeds and Glasgow. His other books include Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement (2004) and Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance (2010).

Related Videos

Ir al contenido